Qur'an

Holy Texts

The Qur'an (Recitation) are the words of God. Muslims believe that it was revealed to Muhammad by the archangel Jibril (Gabriel). This was originally in oral and written form; they were later assembled together into a single book, the Qur'an. Its name is often spelled "Koran" in English. This is not recommended, as some Muslims find it offensive.
 

The Qur'an History
 At various times in the last twenty-three years of his life Mohammed dictated some fragment of this revelation; each was written upon parchment, leather, palm-leaves, or bones, was read to an assembly, and was deposited in various receptacles with preceding revelations, with no special care to keep them in logical or chronological order.
 
No collection of these fragments was made in the Prophet's lifetime.
 
In the year 633 Abu Bekr (the successor to Muhammed) ordered to the Quar'an to be searched out and all fragments brought together. He gathered the fragments, says tradition, “from date leaves and tablets of white stone, and the breasts of men."  Several manuscript copies were made; but as these had no vowels, public readers interpreted some words variously, and diverse texts appeared in different cities of the spreading Moslem realm.

In 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, in Yemen, laborers an unappealing mash of old parchment and paper documents "paper grave" -- in this case the resting place for, among other things, tens of thousands of fragments from close to a thousand different parchment codices of the Koran, the Muslim holy scripture. In some pious Muslim circles it is held that worn-out or damaged copies of the Koran must be removed from circulation; hence the paper graveyard.

Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries -- they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.

"The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still to be felt," says Andrew Rippin, a professor of religious studies at the University of Calgary, who is at the forefront of Koranic studies today. "Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic text is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed."

Just as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hamadi text discoveries have changed the way Christians see the Bible, this discovery could shed some light on how the Koran was written and edited on the centuries by man, from the original words dictated by Muhammad. For the full article click here.

The Hadith, which are collections of the sayings of Muhammad. They are regarded as the Sunnah (lived example) of Muhammad.  The Quran gives legitimacy to the Hadith. However, the writings are not regarded as having the same status as the Holy Qur'an; the latter is considered to be God's word. The great Islamic scholar Yahya bin Sharaf Ul-Deen An-Nawawi compiled a collection of 43 sayings of Prophet Muhammad. It is is now known as "Al-Nawawi's Forty Hadiths"

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